There isn’t much that can prepare you mentally for actually having an opportunity to fight for the Giant Nut. Many members of Team HUGE have had opportunities to win events in the past, whether that be local events or NHRL tournaments. And we’ve even actually won some of them! But the specific stresses, the atmosphere, the effort level, and the costs of Battlebots just make it something exceptional compared to anything else. This is the moment you dream of.
With a win in the Round of 8 over Witch Doctor, we realized that World Championship 7 was crossing from “a great year” into something even more magical. To be fighting for a spot in the finals, after the last 2 seasons HUGE had, served to show how far we had come and how much we had learned.
Copperhead would be our third opponent in a row that was a very short, compact, and highly-competitive vertical spinner. For lack of a better term, we had talked a lot of smack talk for a long time about the small-vertical-spinner type of opponent. And in our last two fights, HUGE lost the use of its weapon due to getting punched very hard upwards (MadCatter) and hitting a very solid object (Witch Doctor).
As for Copperhead, looking at the bot, they appear to have two main design goals:
Punch things upwards very hard
Be a very solid object for people to hit
Crap.
After a 2-3 run in the Battlebots World Championship + the Battlebots: Champions spinoff show, we felt that HUGE still had unfinished business in 2021. The power, speed, and fast spinup of HUGE was really uplifting for us after a tough 2020 season, and we finally felt like the robot was starting to scratch at the limits of its real potential. Plus, we were itching to fight a normally-sized robot after three straight fights against tall, body-threatening opponents.
